Did you know that only about 30% of households choose to adopt their pets from shelters and rescues? This means that most people are choosing to get their pets elsewhere, and this needs to change.

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To help increase foot traffic and entice the general public to visit our shelters, a common and useful strategy is to run adoption promotions that include deep discounts or waived adoption fees. Not only can this strategy be immensely effective at encouraging more visitors to our shelters, but it has been in use and studied for more than a decade. Waiving fees helps our shelters place more spayed/neutered, vaccinated, microchipped animals into loving homes, freeing up space so that we may help more animals in need.

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It is also important to note that when shelters adopt out pets with no adoption fees, the rest of the regular adoption process still applies. Adopters typically fill out some sort of application or questionnaire, talk with an adoption counselor to help them find the right match, provide valid identification, and sign an adoption contract.

 

A peer-reviewed study conducted by the ASPCA’s Emily Weiss, Ph.D., CAAB, and Shannon Gramann took a look at how no-cost adoptions affect adopters’ perception of the value of cats.

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The study, “A Comparison of Attachment Levels of Adopters of Cats: Fee-Based Adoptions Versus Free Adoptions,” was published in the Journal of Applied Welfare Science. In it, the authors found that being adopted without a fee did not lead people to value their pet less than a pet for whom a fee is paid.

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A 2013 case study conducted by the Edmonton Humane Society (EHS) looked at 344 adoptions conducted during special promotions, comparing free and paid adoptions directly to each other.

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From their results:

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• There was no statistical difference in post-adoption veterinary care received by fee-waived and non fee-waived cats. Regardless of fee status, most adopters brought their cats for follow-up veterinary care.

• There was no statistical difference between fee-waived and non fee-waived adopters when it came to retaining cats into the future. In other words, fee-waived cats were just as likely to remain in their homes as non fee-waived cats.

• More than 80 percent of the people who participated in the fee-waived study said they “strongly agree” that EHS considers cats to be valuable and that they would adopt from EHS again. This is important information for shelters to have to alleviate fears that the public will get a false impression that fee-waived cats are not valued.

 

In another study,  survey results gathered from 1,099 pet adopters from the 2011 fee-waived adoption event were analyzed by researchers at Maddie’s® Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Florida. The researchers found that the free adoptions were extremely successful in terms of caregiver characteristics like being attached to the pets, as well as in the pet’s own lifestyle and care:

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• Ninety-three percent of the dogs and 95 percent of the cats were still with their adopters a year after the event.

• Most pets lived predominantly indoors, slept in the family bed, and had been to a veterinarian

• 94 percent of all respondents declared a strong or very strong attachment to the pet.

 

The researchers concluded that successful adoptions do not require payment of a fee, and free adoption promotions may increase adoptions without compromising the quality of the animal’s life.

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It is important to employ all kinds of creative strategies to get pets out of shelters and into loving homes, and offering fee-waived adoptions is a tried-and-true method to do just that.

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Also of interest:

Humane World for Animals: Forget the fairy tale

Humane World for Animals: Adopter Welcome Manual

Best Friends Animal Society: Why reduced-fee adoptions work

Fears, facts and forever homes: What we know about free pet adoptions (Webcast)